"What It Will Take to Build a Sustainable U.S."

By Kenny Ausubel (founder of the Bioneers conference)

...We do have a compass of sorts during these cycles of creative destruction. As Charles Darwin observed, "It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change."

...Ecological regime change means a radical realignment of the human enterprise with nature's governance. We stand at the threshold of a singular opportunity in the human experiment: to re-imagine how to live on Earth in a good way that lasts.
The name of the game is resilience. It means the capacity of both human and ecological systems to absorb disturbance and still retain their basic function and structure. Resilience does not mean just bouncing back to business-as-usual. It means assuring the very ability to get back. But if regime change happens, resilience means having sufficient capacity to transform to meet the new management.

A network of ecologists and social scientists called the Resilience Alliance outlined some of the rules of the road in their book "Resilience Thinking." The first principle of resilience thinking is systems thinking: It's all connected, from the web of life to human systems. "You can only solve the whole problem," says Huey Johnson of the Resource Renewal Institute. Manage environmental and human systems as one system. Taking care of nature means taking care of people, and taking care of people means taking care of nature. Look for systemic solutions that address multiple problems at once. Watch for seeds of new solutions that emerge with changing conditions.

Resilience thinking means abandoning command-and-control approaches. We're not remotely in control of the big wheels of ecological governance or complex human systems. Greater decentralization can provide backup against the inevitable failure of centralized command-and-control structures. Think decentralized power grids, more localized food systems, and the Internet. Always have a backup. Redundancies are good failsafe mechanisms, not the waste portrayed by industrial efficiency-think.

...Some of the most inspiring models are the National Green Plans well underway in the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, and Singapore, as well as in the European Union. In the UK, the movement to Transition Towns is weaning whole populations off imported energy, food, and material goods.

The Dutch National Environmental Policy Plan made sustainability and environmental recovery a national goal. Since its inception in 1989, it has achieved a formidable 70 percent of its mission. This new societal regime aligns business with biology and the state with the public good.

...But the process really kicked in only after business got on board and took the lead. Fate lent a hand. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, some Eastern European nations were eager to establish a market economy. They asked a few key Dutch business leaders to advise them on how they achieved the excellence of Dutch public education, health, and housing, all within a robust business climate.

Upon arrival, the Dutch business leaders literally could not breathe from the out-of-control pollution left by an unaccountable one-party state. Seeing children condemned to grow up in these bereft conditions vaporized their opposition to independent government regulation.

...They returned to Holland with a surprising proposal: Have government set the standards, and let business figure out how to achieve them... Together they developed a twenty-five-year plan, as well as annual plans that report on progress and challenges. If business fails to meet the specific voluntary goals, government will intervene with mandatory controls.

...The odds are especially tough here in the U.S. We need to reclaim our government from the corporate shadow government. It will keep trying to hijack systemic changes that threaten its short-term profits, vested interests and power...Simply put, we need the separation of corporations and the state....